Restaurant Rostering Software: Why Ditch Spreadsheets

Key takeaways

• Restaurant owners using rostering software save hours every week on admin

• Real-time wage cost visibility helps keep labour spend in check — before you publish the roster

• Australian award compliance is built into the rostering workflow — not an afterthought

• Staff can swap shifts, check rosters, and message the team from their phones

• Deputy customers report payroll time dropping from two to three hours down to 45 minutes

If you're still building your weekly restaurant roster in a spreadsheet, you already know the pain. You spend an hour or two putting it together, then someone calls in sick and you're back in the file, texting three people to find a cover, updating cells, and reprinting the whole thing. Every single week. That's before you've even thought about payroll.

Australian restaurant owners are managing more shifts than ever — hospitality activity increased by 28% by late 2025, according to Deputy's Big Shift 2026 report. More shifts means more admin, more complexity, and more room for costly errors. Restaurant rostering software built for Australian businesses — like Deputy — takes that admin off your plate so you can run your venue, not chase a spreadsheet.

Here are 10 reasons Australian restaurant owners are making the switch.

1. Save hours every week on roster admin

2. Keep labour costs visible — before you publish the roster

3. Navigate award rates and pay compliance with confidence

4. Cut payroll processing from hours to minutes

5. Prevent shift conflicts before they cause problems

6. Keep the whole team connected — without the group chat chaos

7. Improve staff satisfaction — and keep the team you've built

8. Manage the roster from your phone, wherever you are

9. Simplify multi-location rostering

10. Make smarter rostering decisions with real data

1. Save hours every week on roster admin

Building a weekly roster from scratch is a task that never gets smaller. You need to account for everyone's availability, match skills to shifts, cover peak periods, and stay within budget — then publish it, field the questions, handle the swap requests, and do it all over again next week. And if you're still doing it in a spreadsheet, every single change means going back into the file.

The numbers are stark. Mari Bornelli, General Manager of Funk Drinks Co., says: "Each pay cycle with the previous [system], I was spending around two to three hours to do payroll and now with Deputy, it took me 45 minutes." That's the kind of time back that adds up — and that's just payroll. Factor in roster building, updates, and communications, and manual processes can easily consume a morning every week.

Deputy's restaurant rostering software replaces that process with roster templates you can copy and tweak week to week, drag-and-drop shift building, and one-click publishing directly to your team's phones. No printing, no texting, no "I didn't see the roster" excuses.

2. Keep labour costs visible — before you publish the roster

Labour is typically the biggest variable cost in a restaurant — the ATO's small business benchmarks confirm it often sits at 30–35% of revenue. In a sector where margins are thin, the difference between a profitable week and a loss can come down to whether you over-rostered on a quiet Tuesday or left a gap on a busy Friday night.

The problem with a spreadsheet roster is that you can't see wage cost as you build it. You find out what you've spent when the payroll run comes through — which is too late to change anything. Deputy shows you the projected cost of the roster before you publish it, so you can make decisions while you still have options.

Declan Lee, Director and Co-Founder of Gelato Messina, explains: "When we create our weekly schedule Deputy gives us a total wage cost and allows us to compare it to previous weeks so we can closely monitor costs and profitability."

That week-on-week comparison is where the real value sits. If you can see that last Saturday's labour cost was 38% of revenue and this week's roster is tracking higher, you can cut a shift before the damage is done. Deputy also connects directly to your POS to pull in live sales data, so your staffing levels are always informed by what's actually happening at the till.

Sit-down restaurants saw a 60% increase in shift hours over the past two years, according to Deputy's Big Shift 2025 report. More hours mean more exposure — and more reason to have live cost visibility built into your rostering workflow.

3. Navigate award rates and pay compliance with confidence

If there's one thing that keeps Australian restaurant owners up at night, it's pay compliance. Getting it wrong — even unintentionally — can mean back-pay claims, fines from the Fair Work Ombudsman, and reputational damage that's hard to recover from. In 2024–25 alone, the FWO recovered $358 million for more than 249,000 underpaid workers across Australia. The challenge isn't that owners don't care. It's that the rules are genuinely complex.

Under the Hospitality Industry (General) Award and the Restaurant Industry Award, your obligations include:

• Base rates that vary by classification and age

• Penalty rates for evenings, Saturdays, Sundays, and public holidays

• Casual loading on top of base and penalty rates

• Overtime calculations that depend on hours worked and roster patterns

• Minimum rest periods between the end of one shift and the start of the next

• Allowances for split shifts, broken shifts, and specific roles

Manually calculating all of that for every shift, every fortnight, across a team of casual and part-time staff is where errors creep in. And when they do, they're rarely in the employee's favour — which is exactly what the Fair Work Ombudsman looks for.

Award interpretation built into the roster

Deputy's award interpretation engine is pre-loaded with Australian Modern Award rates, including the Hospitality Industry (General) Award and Restaurant Industry Award. When you roster a casual staff member for a Sunday double shift, the cost calculation reflects the correct Sunday penalty rates automatically. That removes a manual lookup that many small business owners either skip or get wrong.

Mari Bornelli, General Manager of Funk Drinks Co., puts it plainly: "My level of compliance confidence was pretty low at about 50%. I'm at an 80–90% now." She also describes the challenge before Deputy: "The biggest struggle that I had was being able to make sure that everyone was being paid the right rates and penalties and everything across, depending on where they were working."

Deputy helps you navigate your Fair Work obligations by surfacing the right rates at the right time — though ultimately you remain responsible for ensuring your pay practices meet your legal requirements. If you're unsure about your specific obligations, the Fair Work Ombudsman's website is the definitive AU source.

Timesheets that match the roster — automatically

A major source of underpayments is the gap between what was rostered and what was actually worked. If a staff member started ten minutes early or stayed thirty minutes late, that needs to be captured accurately — not estimated from memory on payday.

Deputy's time clock captures clock-in and clock-out in real time, generating digital timesheets that managers can review and approve before they flow into payroll. You can see actual hours versus rostered hours at a glance, spot discrepancies, and approve with confidence. The loop from roster to timesheet to payroll stays tight — and accurate.

4. Cut payroll processing from hours to minutes

Even when you've got the roster right and the timesheets approved, getting that data into payroll has traditionally meant manual re-entry, CSV exports, and a prayer that nothing got missed. For a restaurant running two or three pay cycles a month with a large casual team, that's a significant chunk of admin time.

Deputy integrates directly with the payroll platforms Australian restaurants actually use, including:

• Xero

• MYOB

• KeyPay (Employment Hero)

• And a range of other AU-supported payroll platforms via the integrations marketplace

When timesheets are approved in Deputy, the data syncs directly to your payroll software — no re-keying, no reformatting, no manual calculation. Pay errors cost money twice: once in the mistake itself, and again in the admin time and potential back-pay required to fix it. Removing manual data transfer from the process is the fastest way to cut both risks.

Mari says: "The best feedback is not having any feedback regarding payroll. We know for a fact there are no issues [since using Deputy]." On the experience of using the platform itself, she adds: "The payroll feature is so easy to use. If there's one thing Deputy is really, really good at, it's the user interface. The platform is just so simple to navigate — honestly, you can't put a price on that."

5. Prevent shift conflicts before they cause problems

Anyone who's managed a restaurant roster knows the moment you publish it and then immediately get a message saying "I put in that I wasn't available that day." Or you look at the roster on Thursday and realise you've got two people rostered on the same section and nobody on the floor. These aren't failures of effort — they're failures of visibility.

Common roster conflicts in AU restaurants include:

• Rostering someone on a shift they've marked as unavailable

• Back-to-back closing and opening shifts without adequate rest between them

• Double-booking a staff member across two sections or venues

• Over-staffing one role while leaving a gap in another

• Rostering part-time staff beyond their contracted hours

Deputy flags these conflicts in real time as you build the roster — before you publish. If you've accidentally rostered someone for a close and then an open the following morning, you'll see a notification while you can still change it, not after the staff member calls to complain. The minimum rest period between shifts is also a Fair Work consideration under the Restaurant Industry Award, so catching those patterns early helps you stay on the right side of your obligations.

You can also set rules around maximum weekly hours and overtime thresholds, so the system flags potential issues before they become real ones.

6. Keep the whole team connected — without the group chat chaos

If your team communication currently lives across three WhatsApp groups, a printed notice board, and a mix of personal text messages, you're not alone. Most Australian hospitality businesses run on exactly that setup — and it creates predictable problems. Important notices get missed. Shift swap requests get lost in the thread. New staff members aren't in the right groups.

When you publish a roster in Deputy, every staff member gets an instant push notification on their phone. They see their upcoming shifts, can confirm availability, and — if you enable it — request swaps directly in the app. No printing, no pinning, no "I didn't see it."

Deputy's news feed and in-app messaging replace the WhatsApp group as the single source of truth for team communication. Managers can post announcements with read confirmations, share training notes, and leave shift-specific instructions — all in one place. It keeps a record, too, which a group chat doesn't.

This matters more than ever for today's hospitality workforce. 64% of hospitality shift workers are now Gen Z, according to the Big Shift 2026 report. This is a generation that expects to manage everything on their phone — they don't want to check a noticeboard or wait for a text. Give them a dedicated app and they'll engage with it.

7. Improve staff satisfaction — and keep the team you've built

Finding good hospitality staff is hard. Keeping them is harder. Deputy's Shift Pulse Report 2025 found that sit-down restaurants saw unhappy sentiment nearly double, with a +3.98% increase in negative sentiment among shift workers. The Australian Bureau of Statistics reports a national job mobility rate of 7.7%, and hospitality consistently sits well above that average. In a sector where experienced staff are difficult to replace, retention is a real business issue — and how you manage rosters is a bigger factor than most owners realise.

Rostering software contributes to staff satisfaction in concrete, practical ways:

• Advance notice — staff can see their roster a week or more ahead, so they can plan their lives around work rather than the other way around

• Digital availability and leave requests — staff submit through the app, you approve in the app, and there's a clear record for both parties

• Fair, consistent rostering — you can track hours by staff member to make sure the same people aren't always picking up the hard shifts

• Shift swap capability — staff who need to change a shift can initiate a swap request themselves, reducing the burden on managers

• Instant roster notifications — no more "I didn't know I was rostered on"

With Gen Z now making up 64% of the hospitality shift workforce, the expectations around flexibility and roster transparency have shifted. This generation values work-life balance and roster predictability. A rostering tool that meets those expectations — rather than fighting against them — is a retention tool as much as it's an admin tool.

The practical message is simple: staff who can see their roster a week ahead, manage their availability from their phone, and trust they'll be rostered fairly are less likely to quit.

8. Manage the roster from your phone, wherever you are

Australian restaurant owners aren't desk-bound. You're on the floor during service, at the markets before opening, driving between venues, or handling the hundred other things that come with running a hospitality business. The idea that roster management has to happen at a desk, from a laptop, is a spreadsheet-era constraint.

With the Deputy app, you can approve a shift swap while you're at the produce market, fill a no-show gap on the commute in, or check tonight's staffing from home. The full roster is in your pocket — and so is the ability to make changes.

Staff get the same mobile experience on their end. They clock in and out from the app, view their rosters, submit leave requests, swap shifts, and message the team — all without needing to come in to check a noticeboard or wait for a phone call. The Deputy app is available for both iOS and Android, designed to work for a workforce that's always on the move.

The practical scenarios stack up quickly: the head chef calls in sick at 7 a.m., you open Deputy, find available staff with the right skills, and send an open shift notification — before you've finished your coffee. That kind of flexibility isn't a luxury. For a restaurant, it's the difference between a covered service and a scramble.

9. Simplify multi-location rostering

When you manage multiple venues, the rostering problem multiplies. Each location has its own team, its own award interpretation requirements, and its own peak periods — but all of it still has to come through you for payroll and compliance oversight. Spreadsheets break down fast at this point. A different file per venue, maintained by different managers, with no shared visibility, is a compliance and cost management headache.

Deputy gives you a single login to see all locations' rosters. Staff who work across multiple venues — casual workers picking up shifts wherever they're needed — can be managed from one place, with their total hours tracked across all locations to catch overtime and award thresholds. Roster templates can be shared across venues, so the same framework that works at your flagship location can be rolled out to a new site quickly.

For franchise operations, the value is even clearer. Consistent award rate application, centralised reporting on labour costs per location, and head-office visibility into every venue's roster means compliance oversight doesn't require being physically present. Whether you're running two venues or ten, you get roll-up reporting and drill-down detail — without managing a separate spreadsheet for each site.

10. Make smarter rostering decisions with real data

Most restaurant owners roster reactively — based on gut feel, last week's roster, and guesswork about what next Saturday will be like. That approach works until it doesn't. An unexpected busy period leaves you understaffed. An over-rostered quiet Tuesday eats into your margin. The same patterns repeat because there's no data to learn from.

Australian shift work hours have increased 40% since 2023, according to Deputy's Big Shift 2025 report. Demand has shifted dramatically and unevenly across days, times, and venue types. Owners who are winning in this environment are the ones using data to build rosters that reflect reality — not a copy of the same spreadsheet from six months ago.

Deputy's reporting and demand forecasting tools show you when you were over-staffed last Saturday night, what your labour cost percentage was during the lunch rush, and which shifts are consistently understaffed relative to trade. When you connect your POS, Deputy can surface the relationship between your sales patterns and your staffing levels — so the next roster is informed by what actually happened, not what you thought would happen.

That's the shift from reactive to proactive rostering: you're not fixing problems after the fact, you're building rosters that are already optimised before the week begins. Over time, those data-driven decisions add up to meaningful cost savings and a better-run venue.

Ready to ditch the spreadsheet?

If your current roster process is costing you hours every week, creating pay compliance risk, and leaving your team in the dark until the notice board gets updated — it's time to change the tools, not just the process.

Deputy is purpose-built for Australian hospitality businesses: award rates pre-configured, AU payroll integrations built in, and a mobile experience your team will actually use. From one cafe to a multi-venue group, Deputy helps you roster smarter, pay accurately, and manage your team without the spreadsheet.

Start your free trial and see how quickly you can get up and running — or talk to our team if you'd like to see it in action first.

Frequently asked questions

Does Deputy handle Australian Modern Award interpretation?

Yes — Deputy is built with Australian award rates pre-configured, covering the Hospitality Industry (General) Award and the Restaurant Industry Award. When you build a roster, Deputy applies the correct base rates, penalty rates, and casual loadings based on when and how each person is rostered. This helps you navigate your Fair Work obligations without needing to look up rate tables manually. You remain responsible for your pay practices, but Deputy's configuration tools help surface the right rates at the right time.

Which payroll platforms does Deputy integrate with?

Deputy integrates with major AU payroll platforms including Xero, MYOB, and KeyPay (Employment Hero), among others. Approved timesheets sync directly to payroll, eliminating manual data entry and reducing the risk of pay errors. You can browse all available integrations in Deputy's integrations marketplace.

How long does it take to set up Deputy for a restaurant?

Most single-location restaurants are up and running within a day. You can import staff details, set up your areas — front of house, kitchen, bar — and publish your first roster quickly. Deputy's onboarding support team can help if you get stuck, and the platform is designed to be intuitive enough that you don't need a manual to get started.

Can my staff see their rosters and swap shifts on the Deputy app?

Yes — when you publish a roster in Deputy, staff receive an instant notification on the Deputy app. They can view upcoming shifts, submit availability, request leave, and — if you enable it — initiate shift swaps with other eligible team members. All swap requests come to you for approval before they're confirmed.

Is Deputy suitable for a small restaurant with fewer than 10 staff?

Yes — Deputy is used by Australian restaurants of all sizes, from single-venue cafes to multi-location groups. Pricing scales with team size, and the core rostering, time clock, and payroll integration features are available to all customers. You don't need a large team to benefit from automated timesheets and real-time wage cost visibility.

How does Deputy help with restaurant labour cost control?

When you build a roster in Deputy, you can see the projected wage cost of that roster before you publish it. You can compare week-on-week to spot if you're over- or under-rostered, and use sales data from your POS to make sure your staffing levels match expected trade. As Declan Lee from Gelato Messina says: Deputy "gives us a total wage cost and allows us to compare it to previous weeks so we can closely monitor costs and profitability."